For first-time authors: name your dissertation something plain and boring if you're planning to turn it into a book. A book and a dissertation should not share a title, so if you've got a good one, save it for later! Your "good" title, by the way, should contain information about the book's topic. That may… Continue reading A few notes on academic book titles
Category: Education
Words and Pain: two poems by Miroslav Holub
This post is modified from the original on Peachleaves. When I was teaching an introductory literature course organized around the concepts of comedy and tragedy, one of my toughest sells was that it is possible--desirable, sometimes--to take apart a joke to see what makes it funny. Thinking critically about humor really brought home the overarching… Continue reading Words and Pain: two poems by Miroslav Holub
How Not To Be: Peer Review
This post is modified from the original, which appeared in 2012 on Peachleaves. Back in my hoop-jumping early years of grad school, I sent an abstract of a seminar paper to three editors of a proposed volume. The road to revision never did run smooth, but the process for this volume was more painful than it… Continue reading How Not To Be: Peer Review
The Flight of the English Major
A recent NYT opinion piece gave some pretty surprising statistics on English majors: "In 1991, 165 students graduated from Yale with a B.A. in English literature. By 2012, that number was 62. In 1991, the top two majors at Yale were history and English. In 2013, they were economics and political science. At Pomona this… Continue reading The Flight of the English Major
Some stories about math
This post originally appeared at Peachleaves. I. I used to say that I was no good at math. I said this partly because sometimes I made Bs in math classes as opposed to As in every other subject. I also said it because it was easy to say. Everybody I knew (with one or two… Continue reading Some stories about math
Whoa whoa whoa!
This post was previously published at Peachleaves blog. Slow day at work, so I finished reading Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas. In the final chapter, my leisurely read-while-at-work pace was jarred when I reached this paragraph: What the surveys suggest is that if doctoral education in English were a cartoon character, then about thirty… Continue reading Whoa whoa whoa!
Sara Davis 